Out of the Shadow: Intellectually Ambitious Women in George Eliot's Essays and Fiction

Abstract

My dissertation aims to investigate how the experiences of intellectually ambitious women in mid-Victorian England are reflected in George Eliot’s essays and two main novels "The Mill on the Floss" (1860) and "Romola" (1863). It will focus especially on the unconventional ambitions of the two heroines, Maggie Tulliver and Romola de Bardi respectively, in order to show how, both characterised by an insatiable thirst for knowledge and hunger for love, they find themselves entangled in the conflict between individual desire and moral responsibility. They both try to resist the social conventions of their culture – mid-Victorian England in the first novel, Renaissance Florence in the second - but only Romola finally succeeds in her quest for individual fulfilment. Eventually this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the relation between passion and duty can resolve itself into an effective cooperation not only in Renaissance Florence - a mythical past and pre-industrial world untroubled by the constraining nineteenth-century bourgeois patriarchy - but also in Victorian England, as exemplified by Eliot’s own experience as an unconventional woman intellectual.

The first chapter of this dissertation will focus on George Eliot’s essays and investigate her critique of contemporary accounts written by women on the role of women, which is counterbalanced by her praise of seventeenth-century French feminine literature. In particular, it will explore how the portrait of a truly cultured woman finds its embodiment in the examples of successful womanly achievement in France.

This paper will then analyse how George Eliot uses her novels as instruments to explore Victorian women’s position in society and the widening of their interests, thus giving voice to their needs and challenging conservative ideas of femininity. The two central chapters are devoted to a comparative analysis of Eliot’s two emblematic heroines and to a critical study of their struggle to find the right balance between the impulse to self-abnegation and the desire for power, always clashing with the ‘need to be loved’.

In the last section it will be shown that these apparently irreconcilable opposites – to be at once conventional and insurgent – found an harmonization in the person of George Eliot herself. To conclude, I will argue that the author, combining male intellect and female feeling, ultimately succeeded in finding a way to integrate knowledge and passion with moral action, as well as in reconciling her overpowering need for love with a resistance to the ideological pression on middle-class women to conform.